Miguel Afonso Caetano

Technical Writer @ UJET.cx (Portugal). PhD in Communication Sciences (ISCTE-IUL). Past: technology journalist, blogger & communication researcher.

#TechnicalWriting #WebDev #WebDevelopment #OpenSource #FLOSS #SoftwareDevelopment #IP #PoliticalEconomy #Communication #Media #Copyright #Music #Cities #Urbanism

Twitter: https://twitter.com/remixtures
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/remixtures
GitHub: https://github.com/remixtures
Academia.edu: https://iscte-iul.academia.edu/MiguelCaetano

Last Notes

2026-03-09 09:52:45 UTC

"DA: The difficulty I have with both social status and contributive justice is that society determines them in a very organic way. So, if we decide that the current meritocratic equilibrium fails to confer appropriate status or dignity on a large segment of the population, how can we change that, especially when the market serves as such a powerful anchor? Even if that weren’t the case, how could anybody deliberately reshape something as organic as our sense of contributive justice?
MS: You’re right. With the market serving as an anchor, it’s easy to assume that what people earn reflects the value of their contribution, at least under competitive conditions. But even the most ardent laissez-faire economist would be hard-pressed to defend the idea that income is a reliable moral measure. If it were, we would have to say that a casino mogul contributes 5,000 times as much to society as a nurse or a schoolteacher.
Do we really believe that? Consider Breaking Bad. The protagonist, Walter White, began as a high school chemistry teacher, struggling to make ends meet and even washing cars after school. Then he became a meth cook and dealer, earning millions of dollars. Yet no one would claim that his contribution to society was greater as a meth cook. On reflection, we are capable of making qualitative moral judgments about the value of different kinds of work, even if we disagree about the details."
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/saving-democracy-in-the-age-of-ai-by-daron-acemoglu-and-michael-j-sandel-2026-03
#Democracy #Capitalism #Markets #AI #Philosophy

2025-10-05 11:41:44 UTC

RT @BenjaminNorton
OpenAI uses as much electricity as New York City and San Diego combined, at the peak of the intense 2024 heat wave.
Or as much as the total electricity demand of Switzerland and Portugal combined.
That's the electricity of roughly 20 million people.
https://fortune.com/2025/09/24/sam-altman-ai-empire-new-york-city-san-diego-scary/

2025-10-02 14:19:50 UTC

RT @jathansadowski
What an unsurprising decision by corporations that desperately need to make money with AI. If every other company with a chatbot isn't already doing this, then expect them to be following Meta's lead soon. The chatbot is not your friend; it's a corporate listening device.
https://www.ft.com/content/22f7afc3-8ac0-4ca1-9877-fd3f8ddcc986

2025-09-28 12:03:50 UTC

- reply

"Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The the same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three)."

2025-09-28 12:02:16 UTC

"I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don't get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money:"
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #FinancialCrisis

2025-09-24 20:35:38 UTC

"Elon Musk has not been shy about putting much of his life on public display. The tech billionaire posts daily on his social network X, has cooperated with two biographies and often speaks on podcasts and at conferences.
But there is one part of his life that he has not revealed much about — his longtime estrangement from his father, Errol Musk, who has become increasingly outspoken about his family and business ventures tied to the Musk name.
A New York Times investigation found that a significant factor in Elon Musk’s rupture with his father stems from accusations against Errol Musk of child sex abuse. The allegations have repeatedly spilled over into Elon Musk’s life as relatives have contacted him for help and he has sometimes taken action to intercede, according to personal letters, emails and interviews with family members.
The family’s troubles have entangled Elon Musk in a painful three-decade multigenerational saga that continues to trail him. The fallout has kept the 54-year-old mogul tethered to South Africa, where he was born and where Errol Musk lives, even as he has built a business empire in the United States and briefly ascended to political power as a close adviser to President Trump.
The allegations against Errol Musk involve five of his children and stepchildren, whom he was accused of abusing in South Africa and California, according to police and court records, personal correspondence, social workers and interviews with family members."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/world/africa/elon-musk-father-errol-child-abuse.html

2025-09-22 10:19:22 UTC

"Morale among employees at Microsoft is circling the drain, as the company has been roiled by constant rounds of layoffs affecting thousands of workers.
Some say they've noticed a major culture shift this year, with many suffering from a constant fear of being sacked — or replaced by AI as the company embraces the tech.
Meanwhile, CEO Satya Nadella is facing immense pressure to stay relevant during the ongoing AI race, which could help explain the turbulence. While making major reductions in headcount, the company has committed to multibillion-dollar investments in AI, a major shift in priorities that could make it vulnerable.
As The Verge reports, the possibility of Microsoft being made obsolete as it races to keep up is something that keeps Nadella up at night.
During an employee-only town hall last week, the CEO said that he was "haunted" by the story of Digital Equipment Corporation, a computer company in the early 1970s that was swiftly made obsolete by the likes of IBM after it made significant strategic errors.
Nadella explained that "some of the people who contributed to Windows NT came from a DEC lab that was laid off," as quoted by The Verge, referring to a proprietary and era-defining operating system Microsoft released in 1993."
https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-concerned-ai-destroy-company
#AI #GenerativeAI #Microsoft #AIBubble #AIHype

2025-09-16 01:02:05 UTC

"Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.
Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts.
In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.
This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths.
In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year."
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-gun-violence-red-states/
#USA #GOP #RepublicanParty #GunViolence #RedStates

2025-09-11 23:38:04 UTC

"If some people didn’t like Kirk or denounced him in harsh terms, this must have inspired someone to kill him. If everyone had simply agreed with Kirk or at least politely disagreed, nobody would try to shoot him.
The problem with this argument is that it is fundamentally authoritarian. Millions of Americans engage in caustic political debates every day. Yet the number of actual political murderers is tiny — you can count them on one hand in any given year. The millions of people hurling insults at eachother are not responsible for the minuscular number of people on their “side” who actually pick up arms and try to harm someone over a disagreement. If we were to believe that speech alone was triggering violence, it would require fundamentally disabling the First Amendment. And that’s just not reasonable in a free country.
In fact, it’s not clear that politics is a big factor in political murder to begin with.
What? Did Zaid just write that? How can politics not be a big factor in political violence?
Well, in almost all recent cases of political violence, we have lonely disturbed individuals gravitating towards a political cause that also leads to the end of their own life or freedom. That’s not the path a happy person chooses."
https://www.theamericansaga.com/p/political-murderers-have-no-party
#FreedomOfSpeech #Politics #USA #PoliticalViolence

2025-08-12 19:10:50 UTC

From the comments: "First it was third-party apps and the API, now it's the Wayback Machine. This is more about control and being able to disappear anything they want than AI scraping."
https://www.theverge.com/news/757538/reddit-internet-archive-wayback-machine-block-limit
#Reddit #SocialMedia #InternetArchive #AI #GenerativeAI #WebScraping

2025-08-02 11:55:23 UTC

"Most Americans think censorship is about banning books, deleting tweets, or deplatforming dissidents. And depending on where and who you are, this can indeed be a primary form of censorship. But in 2025 in America, the most widespread and insidious forms of censorship aren’t about takedowns or suppression of speech— rather, they’re about tuning the algorithm. Quietly, subtly, and almost always with plausible deniability, the Trump administration appears to be executing a playbook of what can best be described as reverse algorithmic capture: a process through which government pressure reshapes the architecture of digital platforms, not by direct control, but by engineering incentives that guide algorithms to amplify preferred narratives and suppress dissent. Put differently, it’s the state using soft power to realign platforms’ invisible gates toward ideological conformity—but never giving up that element of distance and plausible deniability."
https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/revealed-how-the-trump-admin-is-covertly
#USA #Trump #Algorithms #Censorship #Disinformation #SocialMedia

2025-07-22 20:28:10 UTC

"- OpenAI and Anthropic both lose billions of dollars a year after revenue, and their stories do not mirror any other startup in history, not Uber, not Amazon Web Services, nothing. I address the Uber point in this article.
- SoftBank is putting itself in dire straits simply to fund OpenAI once. This deal threatens its credit rating, with SoftBank having to take on what will be multiple loans to fund the remaining $30 billion of OpenAI's $40 billion round, which has yet to close and OpenAI is, in fact, still raising.
- This is before you consider the other $19 billion that SoftBank has agreed to contribute to the Stargate data center project, money that it does not currently have available.
- OpenAI has promised $19 billion to the Stargate data center project, money it does not have and cannot get without SoftBank's funds.
- Again, neither SoftBank nor OpenAI has the money for Stargate right now.
- OpenAI must convert to a for-profit by the end of 2025, or it loses $20 billion of the remaining $30 billion of funding. If it does not convert by October 2026, its current funding converts to debt. It is demanding remarkable, unreasonable concessions from Microsoft, which is refusing to budge and is willing to walk away from the negotiations necessary to convert.
- OpenAI does not have a path to profitability, and its future, like Anthropic's, is dependent on a continual flow of capital from venture capitalists and big tech, who must also continue to expand infrastructure.
Anthropic is in a similar, but slightly better position — it is set to lose $3 billion this year on $4 billion of revenue. It also has no path to profitability, recently jacked up prices on Cursor, its largest customer, and had to put restraints on Claude Code after allowing users to burn 100% to 10,000% of their revenue. These are the actions of a desperate company."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Anthropic #ChatGPT #Claude #AIBubble #AIHype #SoftBank #StarGate